As 2 antique dealers try to take over her affairs, family warns her and worries

Second of four chapters

By Lee HancockStaff Writer

Mary Ellen Bendtsen’s Swiss Avenue mansion was her world, and it was coming apart.

Almost desperate, she went along when her daughter, Frances Ann Giron, told city officials in June 2002 that the house would be sold so someone else could deal with its decades of disrepair. Mrs. Bendtsen wore party clothes the July morning a real estate broker came so she and her reclusive sister, Ann “Pretty Annie” McClamrock, could sign a listing agreement.1

NOTE: Click on numbered footnotes within the story to view
and access supporting documents.

More than 50 people were interviewed and thousands of pages
of documents reviewed for this series. For additional information on sourcing,
consult the endnotes provided for each chapter. Some confidential sources who
asked not to be named are not included in the endnotes. On DallasNews.com/4949swiss,
links to original documents are included in the notes. Some documents are excerpts.

Next Sunday in Points: Why is it so difficult to protect the elderly from financial exploitation?

Coming Tuesday:An intricate dance begins between Mrs. Bendtsen, Mr. McCay and Mr. Burgess. For a while, she keeps them at armís length, even while enjoying their help and attention. But when an unexpected calamity occurs, Mrs. Bendtsenís carefully constructed world is threatened.

But she wouldn’t put out a for-sale sign or do anything needed to put the place on the market. She was equally dismissive of her daughter’s offer to build a place near her home in Florida, telling friends she couldn’t abide low ceilings or Yankee neighbors.2

She played to her audience, but only from center stage, and only at 4949 Swiss Avenue.

“She’d tell everybody what they wanted to hear,” Mrs. Giron says. “We’d have a conversation, and the next day the conversation would change. Her reality would be what she would want it to be.”3

The illusions she’d spent a lifetime weaving were entangling her.

Changed demeanor

One Friday in November 2002, Art Mirzatuny stopped by 4949 Swiss to deliver groceries and check on his former mother-in-law. He came every week. This time, there were no grand stories, none of Mary Ellen’s usual stalling to keep him in that crazy house long after he wanted to leave. Instead, she asked him to take something. It was her new will, and everything would go to her daughter or grandchildren - Dr. Mirzatuny’s son and daughter.

She talked to her mother several times a week and saw her every few months, going to Dallas or flying her to Florida. But she was getting nowhere in her efforts to persuade her mother to give up 4949 Swiss.

At the dilapidated house, there were break-ins, regular calls to police when Mrs. Bendtsen got scared and a near-disaster with an ancient stove. Mrs. Bendtsen kept a burner lit round the clock - it was stuck, and she couldn’t turn it off. The fire department had to cut off the gas.5

More and more, Mrs. Bendtsen mentioned two antiques dealers, Mark McCay and Justin Burgess. Her daughter says she first thought they were two more of the gay men her mother always attracted, men who “liked to live in the fantasy that my mother created.”

But her mother started calling them “her boys” and saying she was their mentor. It sounded as if they were at her mansion often and late, though Mrs. Bendtsen was vague about what they all did. She never mentioned that they wanted to move in or that they asked her to sign legal papers earlier in the year.

What she did talk about was the boys’ declarations that she was still gorgeous, still young and glamorous, still had the kind of legs high heels were made for.

“Why is that so important, that these people think you’re so special?” Mrs. Giron asked her one morning.

There was silence on the other end of the phone line.

“I’ve always had so much attention, and I don’t have it any more, and I miss it,” her mother finally said.6

The antiques dealers’ names had come up repeatedly in the previous spring’s mess with the city over the mansion’s disrepair. The two men convinced Mrs. Bendtsen that they could get preservation grants to take care of everything the city demanded be fixed. City officials and preservationists tried explaining that there were no big grants for restoration.

Courtesy

Art Mirzatuny is Frances Ann's first husband. He remained close to Mary Ellen Bendtsen's family.

A city official went to the mansion to warn Mrs. Bendtsen face to face: The “boys” might be trouble.7

Dr. Mirzatuny called his ex-wife, worried that her mother wasn’t eating the groceries he left her. And she had let it slip that she still saw the antiques dealers.8

“Mother, why do you think that these two young men are taking you out to dinner? You’re fun, and you play great piano. But you’re considerably older,” Mrs. Giron said to her. “Mother, I’m scared to death of them.”

“She thought it was all moonlight and magnolias, and they loved her.”

Mrs. Giron flew to Dallas and treated her mother and Mr.
McCay and Mr. Burgess to dinner, to try to get a feel for them. Her mother
chose the trendy Green Room in Deep Ellum, and the expensive, boozy evening
left Mrs. Giron unnerved. She called Mr. McCay as soon as she got home.

“I know what you’re up to,” she told him. “My mother has no money. And if you don’t stay away from her and leave her alone, I’m going to have a temporary restraining order to keep you away.”

The two men recount the conversation differently. They say their relationship with Mrs. Giron went from cordial to hostile after they refused to help convince her mother that she wasn’t capable of staying in the mansion.10

Edwin C. Olsen IV, a lawyer who has represented the two men (and Mrs. Bendtsen for a time), says the disagreement opened a permanent rift.

“From that point on,” Mr. Olsen says, “she was their mortal enemy.” 11

‘They were using her’

Soon, Mrs. Bendtsen was spending more time alone.

She’d grown apart from the two antiques dealers who had wined and dined her so regularly, she told one friend, Jack Pennington. A big reason was that her daughter “threw a fit.”

“Frances Ann is worried about them taking advantage of me,” she said.

She’d had her own fuss with the two men after they pushed to move into 4949 Swiss and wanted her to sign a power of attorney and include them in her will. They were unhappy that she said no, she explained, but “I’m no fool.”

“She knew that they were using her,” Mr. Pennington says. And she enjoyed using them, too, “for getting out, for entertainment … when it served her purpose.”

It was clear she enjoyed being in the middle of controversy. “Anything she could do to kind of stir the pot a little bit, she loved that,” he says.12

Some of Mrs. Bendtsen’s friends believed the two men appreciated her and her beloved mansion in a way her daughter couldn’t or wouldn’t. Those who liked the antiques dealers said her daughter’s disdain for her mansion and lifestyle was so upsetting that Mrs. Bendtsen sometimes declared Frances Ann didn’t deserve to inherit anything.

Even people who weren’t fond of the men say they lavished attention that Mrs. Bendtsen was increasingly desperate for, as her home became so rundown that she quit having parties. Newer residents of Swiss Avenue knew her only by mysterious reputation, as a spectral link to its glitzy past.

Michael Ainsworth /DMN

A porch roof at 4949 Swiss Ave. is held up by braces. Mary Ellen Bendtsen ignored her daughter's pleas to move out of the deteriorating mansion.

“They would come and they would sit there,” one friend of more than 30 years says of the men.

Mary Ellen would entertain and play the grande dame.

“They played to her. She damned well knew they wanted the house,” recalls the friend, who asked not to be named because she wants to stay out of the fight. “She thought she was playing them.”

As always, 4949 Swiss was foremost in her mind.

“She would’ve danced with the devil and told him he was handsome,” another friend says, laughing, “if that’s what she had to do to stay in that house.” 13

Another widow

By the end of 2003, the antiques dealers were spending more time with another East Dallas widow, Mary Jane Beaman.

Like Mrs. Bendtsen, Mrs. Beaman was active in preservation circles and had an out-of-state daughter worried she was too old to live alone in a big home.14

Mrs. Beaman also possessed a fat checkbook, and Mr. McCay and Mr. Burgess had a business in need. Mr. Burgess had to file for bankruptcy in August 2003, two years after testifying in a deposition that Deco-Dence had never made a profit.15

Mrs. Beaman’s daughter became so leery of the men - particularly after Mr. McCay declared that the 85-year-old was his best friend - that she begged her mother not to get financially involved. Mrs. Beaman’s maid, sure the men were after money, also warned her.16 But the widow wrote the men a big check in December and eventually handed over more than $20,000. The daughter says the transactions, labeled “investment” and “short-term loan,” weren’t repaid.

“I was walking kind of a tightrope with trying to figure out what to do about them and the fact that my mother was so infatuated with Mark,” recalls the daughter, Gale Criswell of Baton Rouge, La. “I didn’t want to alienate her.”

Just before Mrs. Beaman had minor surgery in June 2004, Mr. McCay proposed to her and her daughter that she sign a power of attorney - it would spare Ms. Criswell the trouble of coming to Dallas.

Ms. Criswell waved off the offer and hurried to Dallas. She was with her mother when she died unexpectedly.17

Then, Mr. McCay abruptly turned hostile. To her mother’s friends, he portrayed Ms. Criswell as a bad, estranged daughter, though she’d visited every few months. Mr. McCay and Mr. Burgess tried to take over the funeral and had a reception excluding family. Some older residents thought the men were just grieving for a friend they’d made happy in her last days.

But Swiss Avenue resident Virginia McAlester couldn’t believe Mr. McCay’s vehemence about Mrs. Beaman’s daughter when he called about his reception. She tried lightening things by asking about Mrs. Bendtsen.

“Oh, we don’t talk to her any more,” he said. “She doesn’t know how to treat us right.”

Mrs. McAlester was stunned: Her friend might be the reigning eccentric of Swiss Avenue, with her fabulous ’40s wardrobe and her fabulist stories, but she was gracious to a fault.18

An old friend’s call

Later that summer of 2004, the Rev. Tom Butler, a Catholic priest who grew up with Mrs. Giron, phoned her from Dallas, shocked that her mother hardly recognized him.

He had just made a surprise visit while in from Michigan because Mrs. Giron was so worried after seeing her mother that July.

Courtesy

From left: Frances Dee Logan posed with her daughters, Mary Ellen and Ann.

He found Mrs. Bendtsen outside in a dirty housedress. She was alarmingly thin and smelled like she hadn’t bathed for days. All she had on her face was Scotch tape between her eyebrows - an old remedy for frown lines. She didn’t ask him in, and for the first time he could recall, wouldn’t go out.

“She was always kind of nutty and charming, but in a nice way,” Father Butler says. “It was the first time I knew there was dementia.” 19

For her daughter, the last straw was a stranger’s call.

Swiss Avenue residents Frann Love and her husband, David, spent months coaxing information from Mrs. Bendtsen so they could contact her daughter. “She didn’t want us to make the connection,” Frann Love told Mrs. Giron.

She explained that Mrs. Bendtsen seemed more forgetful by the week. There had been more break-ins, and Mrs. Bendtsen had found a vagrant sleeping on her porch. And she talked of seeing men her daughter tried to run off, antiques dealers who’d asked her to sign papers.

Mrs. Love and her husband had offered to buy 4949 Swiss, repair it and let Mrs. Bendtsen stay there. But she had put them off, so the Loves decided someone in her family had to know: Mary Ellen was in trouble.20

‘Low-class household’

Mrs. Giron and her husband, Richard, a sales executive, hurriedly leased a place in Plano big enough for three. Mrs. Giron brought her mother there the first of October 2004.

Mrs. Bendtsen initially seemed resigned to staying. By November, though, she was agitating to go home. Exasperated, Mrs. Giron let her go while she figured out how to sell the mansion.21

Mrs. Bendtsen complained to friends that her son-in-law Richard Giron was gruff and that her daughter talked dismissively of getting rid of her things. She couldn’t live in a “low-class household.” She told her former son-in-law, Dr. Mirzatuny, that she was back on Swiss Avenue for good.

“There was no limelight in Plano. Mary Ellen needed limelight,” Dr. Mirzatuny says. “Frances couldn’t get past this. No one could. When you would introduce her, Mary Ellen would say, ‘I live on Swiss. At 4949 Swiss Avenue.’ … That was her life. The entire meaning was 4949, and if you took that away or even threatened - well, that would be a disaster.”

Near Christmas, Mrs. Bendtsen called Dr. Mirzatuny. She sounded oddly girlish as she told him that “father won’t be happy” unless everyone was at the mansion for the holidays. She ended the conversation as he tried to remind her that her father had been dead for decades.

A friend who took Mrs. Bendtsen on a holiday outing before she joined her daughter for Christmas thought she was as festive as ever, save for one odd moment.

“I don’t want anything else to do with Justin or Mark. They are driving me crazy,” Mrs. Bendtsen told Carol Piper. “I’m scared of them. They’re asking me to do some things that I’m not comfortable with.” 23

In the hospital

On a rainy Wednesday in mid-January 2005, Mrs. Bendtsen fell down the steps of 4949 Swiss while checking her mail. She gashed her forehead but managed to get back inside. A friend alerted her family, and by nightfall, she was in Baylor University Medical Center’s neurological intensive care unit. Stitches covered her left eyebrow, and a small brain hemorrhage worried doctors.24

Over the next few days, doctors noted that she was “clearly not able to return home,” and she seemed to realize that, too. She signed power-of-attorney papers on Jan. 14 so Mrs. Giron could pay bills and make decisions.25

She was badly confused, thought it was 1960 and was often so agitated that she had to be restrained. She was so wobbly that doctors feared she would fall again and said she needed four weeks of inpatient physical therapy.26 So Mrs. Giron decided to spend Jan. 18 checking out rehab facilities in Plano.

She called her mother late that afternoon to say she’d found a nice place, and would see her in the morning. She asked, absently, what Mrs. Bendtsen was doing.

“We’re watching TV,” her mother said.

“Who’s with you?” Mrs. Giron asked.

“Oh, I mean, I’m watching TV. No one’s here but me.”

Mark McCay and Justin Burgess had been in Mrs. Bendtsen’s hospital room for hours.27

More than 50 people were interviewed and thousands of pages
of documents reviewed for this series. For additional information on sourcing,
consult the endnotes provided for each chapter. Some confidential sources who
asked not to be named are not included in the endnotes. On DallasNews.com/4949swiss,
links to original documents are included in the notes. Some documents are excerpts.

1Information about Mary Ellen Bendtsen's signing of a listing agreement came from interviews with her sister, Ann Logan McClamrock; the real estate broker, Douglas Newby; and Mrs. Bendtsen's daughter, Frances Ann Giron. Mrs. Bendtsen and her sister signed the agreement at the Swiss Avenue mansion on July 25, 2002.

2Mrs. Bendtsen's sister and daughter detailed how Mrs. Bendtsen sidetracked their efforts to put the house up for sale. The broker, Mr. Newby, said the agreement was a preliminary step allowing the sisters to explore options. It included a clause allowing Mrs. Bendtsen to say when -- or if -- the house would be offered for sale. "Mary Ellen was conflicted. She wanted to make a prudent decision. She wanted her sister happy. But first and foremost, she loved her home," he says. "Mary Ellen was pretending to list and her sister was pretending that something was going to happen."
Mrs. McClamrock says her sister signed the agreement only because "the city of Dallas was getting awfully mad at her. I told her, 'Mary Ellen, they're going to condemn this place if you don't sign this.' [Mr. Newby] asked her, 'Can I put a sign in the yard?' She said, 'No, not now.' He said, 'What about multiple listings?' She said, 'Not right now.' I didn't say anything. What good would it have done? ... It was clearing the way to let it happen, maybe a little bit later."
Information about Mrs. Bendtsen's comments to friends came from interviews with Dan Fry, Jeff Martin, Bea Grayson and several friends who spoke on condition of anonymity.

3Interviews with Mrs. Giron.

4Interviews with Dr. Art Mirzatuny. His account of Mrs. Bendtsen's demeanor and remarks at Thanksgiving dinner was corroborated in an interview with his daughter, Mrs. Bendtsen's granddaughter, Marita Mirzatuny. His practice of checking weekly on Mrs. Bendtsen was corroborated in interviews with Mrs. Giron, Mrs. McClamrock and friends of Mrs. Bendtsen.

6Interviews with Mrs. Giron. Corroborated by interviews with Mrs. McClamrock and her sons, John and Henry McClamrock.

7City of Dallas Urban Standards and Rehabilitation Board records. Also, interviews with an architect and a friend of Mrs. Bendtsen's who spoke on condition of anonymity. Each indicated that the only grant available was less than $1,000.

8Interviews with, Mrs.
Giron.

9Interviews with Mrs. Giron. Mrs. McClamrock and a friend who spoke on condition of anonymity each recall Mrs. Bendtsen talking about her dinner with the two men and her daughter after it occurred.

11Interviews with Mr. Olsen, who says Justin Burgess took the call and later recounted how Mrs. Giron considered him and Mr. McCay to be her opponents after he "declined to cooperate with Mrs. Giron and Mrs. Giron's expressed plan."

12Interviews with Jack Pennington. The accounts from multiple sources that Mark McCay and Mr. Burgess were encouraging Mrs. Bendtsen to sign a power of attorney are supported by a document that later became a key part of a dispute between them and Mrs. Giron. That document, a power of attorney for Mrs. Bendtsen, includes a notary signature page indicating it was originally drawn up in early November 2003. That date was crossed out when the document was executed several years later and notarized by the same woman who notarized a number of documents for the two men and Mrs. Bendtsen.

13Interviews with Dan Fry, Jeff Martin and two longtime friends of Mrs. Bendtsen's who spoke on condition of anonymity.

14Interviews with Gale Criswell, Mary Jane Beaman's daughter. Also based on interviews with Deb O'Brien, a friend of Ms. Criswell's and Mrs. Beaman's, and an Aug. 5, 2005, letter Ms. Criswell wrote to Mrs. Giron's attorneys detailing her mother's personal and financial involvement with Mr. McCay and Mr. Burgess.

17Interviews with Ms. Criswell and
Ms. O'Brien, a friend of hers and her mother's, and information from Ms. Criswell's
Aug. 5, 2005, letter. Mr. Burgess never mentioned Mrs. Beaman when asked to
name investors in Deco-Dence in a deposition given during his bankruptcy. The
deposition came in a bankruptcy fraud action filed in connection with his bankruptcy
case, #03-02944BJH, pp. 23-30. The action was settled with no finding that
Mr. Burgess committed wrongdoing. A bankruptcy trustee recommended settlement
after determining that Mr. Burgess' estate lacked the value to justify pursuing
the allegations. Mr. Burgess was asked, "Has anybody else other than the Pettys,
yourself and Mr. McCay put any money into Deco-Dence LLC?" Mr. Burgess answered, "No." A
lawyer then asked, "... Invested any money into the LLC?" Mr. Burgess answered, "No." A
canceled December check from Mrs. Beaman labeled "short term loan," other bank
records and a signed May 2004 agreement with Mr. McCay and Mr. Burgess suggest
that the widow had given $14,000 to Deco-Dence by the time of Mr. Burgess'
deposition. Burgess deposition, p. 29.

22Accounts of Mrs. Bendtsen's calls to her son-in-law are based on interviews with Dr. Mirzatuny. What she told friends after leaving her daughter's home comes from interviews with Dixie Tidwell and Bea Grayson and the deposition of Marian Gibson, a friend of the two antiques dealers and Mrs. Bendtsen, pp. 15-17.